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Re:Software to capture votes in upcoming German national ele... by mtgx on Thursday September 07, 2017 @08:23AM (#15191153)
This is why electronic voting is such a huge problem to solve. You can't just check one or two boxes like "blockchain" and "biometric authentication" and think "there, we now have secure electronic voting". There are so many other things that should go into securing the electronic voting, including doing thorough audits of the code before the election, keeping the systems up to date, having anti-tampering protection, allowing users to verify their vote in a secure way, and so many other things I can't think of right now.

But all of those things will get lost when talked about in the media or on TV, and the politicians won't care to implement them either. It's a little like nuclear energy being "safe" - except for all the problems humans and their corruption could cause around it. But electronic voting is much worse, because I very much doubt the current political climate would want to handle electronic voting with at least as much care (it's the democracy at stake after all) as they do nuclear power plants. If anything, the two main parties would probably be fine with some vulnerabilities if they think only they can exploit them.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that electronic voting has always been doomed to fail and will always be doomed to fail due to all of the other implementation details that always lack from the discussion beyond a few main check boxes. All of that stuff is "nerd talk" so few of the leaders will care about them, which means budgets won't go towards solving those problems and ensuring those other checks exist, too, and are properly managed.

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